What do you get when you mix The Bear, The Seven Year Slip, The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, and… Ghostbusters? Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle.

This books surprised me in so many ways, in the best ways. I expected a fun, quirky ghost story that had some fun restaurant scenes. What I got was a beautiful exploration of grief, self-doubt, life after loss, and how people connect through foods they share.

There were multiple times I thought I knew where the story was going, only to be surprised by a turn it took or a reveal made. I could not get over the way Lavelle worked in culinary lingo throughout the writing. It made me smile so much.

I have to admit, I’m 100% the target audience for this book. While I never made it to culinary school, becoming a chef was a longtime dream of mine and following the “food scene” is still a big part of my life. I love cooking and sharing meals with those I love, and so many of my memories revolve around food. So this book in particular felt like a love letter to my life. I especially related to Kostya’s relationship to food and memories with his dad - it’s how I feel about a lot of memories with my grandfather.

I love this book thoroughly. Thank you for the opportunity to read this ARC!

I almost gave up on this because the descriptions of growing up as a Ukrainian immigrant in Brooklyn reminded me too much of my ex-husband but I am so glad I stuck it out because WOW! The writing and the food descriptions were gorgeous. The emotions evoked by this book were strong and I found myself in tears a few times throughout. Such a wonderful testament to the power of food and it's connection to memory and emotion. The characters were endearing even at their worst. This is one of the best books I've read in a very long time.

Daria Lavelle’s “After Taste” was a great read. Though I usually avoid paranormal literature, this book captivated me from the start. The storytelling and concept were flawless, tackling grief with both heartbreak and uplift.

Kostya discovers that he can reunite people with their deceased loved ones—at least for the length of time it takes them to eat a dish that he’s prepared because he can taste a meal they had and recreate it. Food and spirits are the center of this story. As he brings people together with their loved ones, he creates a problem between the veil of the living and the dead.

This story is heavily centered on food, which I found to be unique for a ghost story. I enjoyed the character development and the story of the ghosts. However, as this is heavily based on food, I am unsure if it's for everyone.

In the end, I enjoyed the story and how it turned out. I am a foodie, so the food aspect of the story did not bother me, and I enjoyed that aspect.

Aftertaste
Daria Lavelle
Pub: 5/20/25
4☆

A food story to binge.
A ghost story to devour.
A love story to savor.

What if you could have one last meal with someone you’ve loved, someone you’ve lost?

This was such a unique and interesting read. I loved how Lavelle explored the powerful connection between food and grief. It was well written, perfectly paced, and the descriptions were so vivid I swear my mouth was watering throughout the entire book. I got completely caught up in Konstantin’s story but also took a side trip down my own memory lane felling all the feels and thinking about loved ones and what I wouldn’t give to share one last meal with them.

What I enjoyed;
✨ Heartwarming Story
✨ Darker Elements
✨ Restaurant/Chef Vibes
✨ Food/Grief Connection
✨ Afterlife Elements

A solid debut you wont want to miss. Thank you so much Simon Books Buddy for gifted exclusive preview edition and for the opportunity to be an early reader.

Thanks to NetGalley for this advance reader copy in exchange for a review. All opinions stated here are my own.
This book has such a great premise. What if you could connect with a deceased loved one by way of food? Reminiscent of Before The Coffee Gets Cold, you get the chance to see your loved one again but you only have the time it takes to finish your meal. I guess that’s where the similarities between the books ends.
Becoming a chef and conjuring dead folks is great until everything unravels. There’s a thriller element, a Russian mob, a love interest that’s not what she seems, and a host of hangry dead people threatening everything.
The author is very creative. The book slows a bit in the middle but the end is fast and furious. I thought I would have liked it more, but it gave me something to talk about as I shared it with my coworkers. Really unique.
A little more than 3.5 stars

A “dark comedy about food, ghosts, and the New York culinary scene,” Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle, will be published in May 2025 by Simon & Schuster. It's epic, vivid, memorable, fast-paced, and haunting.

Konstantin Duhovny at age ten does that terrible thing so many kids do, shouting some epithet at a parent in a fit of anger. Most kids get a chance to take it back, apologize, and atone. Not Kostya. As his father heads out the door to work without taking time to play a favorite game with him, Kostya thunderously tells him to go to the devil. It would be the last thing his dad would ever hear him say. Days, months, and years later, Kostya keeps telling himself his dad knew he hadn’t meant it, but the pain will keep lancing him “like a barb” all the days of his life.

How does any child overcome the guilt of those stinging last words? At what price will closure come, if ever it does?

Ukrainian-born author Daria Lavelle captures this haunting event in memorable and moving prose. She brings to life the hardships and personalities of this Ukrainian immigrant family. Somehow, along with all the gritty realism, Lavelle injects fantasy and magic, and we buy it.

The magic begins with Kostya at a swimming pool, suddenly tasting and feeling, in his mouth, the chicken liver with onions his mother had cooked for his father. Pechonka, Dad's favorite dish. The ghost of that dish, not its taste but its aftertaste, had been “spirited there by the person who most longed to taste it again.”

Weeks later, it happened again. And again. Aftertastes appeared like messages in his mouth. Different foods each time. Foreign. The ghosts sending him these messages won't leave him alone. When he tells his mother, she sends Kostya to the white-coats. He learns how not to swallow the pills, how to tell the doctors what they want to hear, how to lie his way out of the psychiatric ward.

He will never learn how to keep the ghosts from visiting him. On the bright side, they seem harmless, “mild mannered, even sentimental.”

Kostya “hallucinates” an amazing variety of exotic dishes, and he somehow knows exactly what’s in them. Walking in Times Square, stuck in traffic with his delivery job, any time, any place, he may get a fleeting aftertaste. Pork dumpling, hint of chive, hoisin, and rice vinegar, kick of spicy mustard.

He’s about the same age as Jesus when Kostya pulls off his first miracle. A difficult patron, drunk at the bar, asks for a drink at closing time. Kostya has no training as a bartender or a chef, but when the Aftertaste strikes, he mixes up the cocktail that will summon the lost loved one of this drunken patron. He even witnesses a dialogue between the man and his dead wife, who has materialized “in a million pinpricks of light,” illuminated in green. This stranger gets the closure Kostya has never gotten with his father.

The story line shifts into the fast lane, faster and ever faster, with mishaps and setbacks, as Kostya with his new cooking talent opens a portal. The bereft can eat the food their lost loved one craves, and they get to have one more conversation.

How does Kostya find the right ingredients to cook each dish? He’d never summon my grandpa’s garden tomatoes or beef from the cow he raised and butchered, but never mind the many slow-grown, slow-cooked foods we know to be unrepeatable: The premise is fantastical, yes, but grant the storyteller some artistic license, and the fun begins.

It’s fun at first, anyway. Sumptuous dishes are served, and lovely prose, with feel-good insights such as this:

– Kitchens were private places, where alchemy occurred, where sausage was made, where, once in a while, the divine was summoned and baked into a pie.

– A recipe could tell you who someone had been, what they had loved, the things that had sustained them. It was a way for others to carry them along, to bring them back, to keep them close once they had gone. A way to never really die.

– Food could do that. It could tell stories … Leaving behind a recipe as a way to be remembered and savored and loved even after you were gone. A way to live forever.

– What they make is fleeting–edible raptures that last only as long as it takes to consume them. But the recollection, the conversations about these morsels, the sweet nostalgia of the best things their clientele have ever eaten–those last forever.

It isn’t just good food that one might crave. The reasons for a food’s greatness “were as personal as a fingerprint.” What we eat doesn’t matter nearly as much has why. Some of us may form an attachment to food that is actually awful. Raman noodles can take us back to our college days. Ketchup and crackers your penniless mother smuggled from a restaurant might trigger the inextricable food link between the living and the dead. “But that was the thing about food you ate when you had nothing: the smallest things–warmth, crunch, calories, someone making it for you, taking care of you even if only in some small way, or making it yourself, proving that you could survive even when the world didn’t want you to–could make it the best thing you ever ate.”

The New York culinary scene with all its famed chefs may not have a clue what “comfort food” means, but Kostya does. His father “had been amazed by American eateries, by pizza parlors and diners and hamburger joints, by the idea, the thrill of it, a place you could sit and eat and still afford to pay rent after, where the food was good and fast and cheap, a holy trinity. This…is truly American. Everyone equal in pizzeria.”

Kostya meets the woman of his dreams, a medium named Maura, who eventually lets him down. Kostya's near-cliche of a mother may be a real piece of work, a woman who’d trade food stamps for cigarettes in Kostya’s hungry childhood, a woman whose phone calls he usually ignores, but she has some memorable moments in the book. I love her advice (with the Ukrainian accent):

“Sometimes the people you love hurt you. Sometimes they mean to. And sometimes they don’t mean, but cannot help. It is you who must decide to keep loving them anyway.”

Love your awful mother. Forgive your scheming girlfriend. Or not.

The plot thickens, terrible things happen, increasing numbers of “hangry” ghosts get out of control, and readers wanna know: Will Kostya make the ultimate sacrifice to restore order to the world of the living?

The answer surprised me.

No spoilers here. Let’s just say I love Kostya and even his awful mother, but I never liked Maura or her dead sister. That’s purely personal, so my opinions are irrelevant.

If you love expensive restaurants and gourmet chefs (I do not), this is your kind of novel. Me, I was skimming or speed-reading the recipes to get through what could have been a tedious slog.

The concept of foods we associate with our family and friends, and with certain places and phases in our lives: fantastic! Bravo! I love the way Lavelle brings it all to life.

Richly drawn characters, memorable, and endearing, caught up in a fast-paced plot that spins out of control and into the realm of fantasy, make this a worthy debut novel.

Thank you Net Galley and Simon & Schuster for this Advance Reader Copy.

I adored this book. It was dark, heartfelt, moving and emotional. I love the connection between food, relationships and memory. Beautifully written and well thought out.

Aftertaste is a novel like no other. It is about the love of food, that special person in your life that you never forgot about , and what would you do to reconnect with the afterlife. It follows Konstantin Duhovny a young boy struggling with the loss of his father and his mother's depression that keeps her in bed for days at a time. Kostya"s first Aftertaste comes to him after an incident at the public pool. The taste was the dish that his dad loved the most. After Kostya tells his mother about his father's Aftertaste she admits him into the hopital for mental illness. After getting out Kostya swears to not tell anyone about the Aftertaste again. As a young man working in a speakeasy bar as a dishwasher Kostya finds himself making a special cocktail for the only patron there. What happens next Kostya would not believe if he wasn't there to see it for himself. Charlie, the man at the bar struggling with the death of his wife, drinks the cocktail that was made for him and his wife slowly reappears. Once the drink is fully consumed his wife can move on to the other side. Now Kostya has to recreate his dad's dish to let him know how sorry he was the last time they saw each other. During this quest he stumbles in a job at a high end restrurant as a dish washer and soon works his way up the line. After that job ended very badly Kostya opens his own restrurant from his Hell's Kitchen apartment. Now Koysta has to make the choice to do the right thing with the afterlife or keep chasing the Aftertaste. I would like to thank both NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for letting me read an advance copy of this novel.

Just like a perfect meal, Aftertaste has all of the ingredients for a memorable experience! Prepare to fall into this story of a haunted chef who can reunite people with departed loved ones through a mutual love of an important food or meal between them. This novel blends several genres to create a memorable reading experience as main character Kostya learns to navigate the unique ability he has to reunite the living with deceased loved ones through a shared meal or food that was important to each of them. Warning--don't read this one hungry, as you will want to devour every meal that is described within the pages. Highly recommend. Thanks so much to Simon and Schuster and NetGalley for the ARC. Looking forward to hand selling this one upon publication.

this book fed my soul and stir so many emotions i was keeping to myself. it was a haunting, exquisite exploration of grief, love, and the sensory magic of food. this was a literary feast that leaves an unforgettable imprint.

Konstantin Duhovny is a man burdened by ghosts—not just metaphorically, but literally. he doesn’t see spirits; he tastes them. the lingering flavors of the meals they cherished in life flood his senses, an intimate and melancholic reminder of their presence. When Kostya realizes he can reunite the living with their lost loved ones through the power of his cooking, he embarks on a journey that is as beautiful as it is dangerous. his path leads him into the inferno of the New York culinary world, where ambition, passion, and grief simmer in equal measure. But what begins as a gift to the grieving soon turns into something more ominous, and as he teeters on the edge of his abilities, love finds its way into his life—at the worst possible moment.

this is one of the best storytelling i have ever read, a perfect blend of dark comedy and romance. every page pulses with life, every meal described so vividly that you can almost taste it. the writing was so lush, evoking not just the flavors of food but the textures of longing, of heartbreak, of the aching need to hold on to the past. Kostya is a protagonist both deeply flawed and deeply human, and his journey is one of self-discovery, loss, and the universal hunger for connection.

this novel doesn’t just tell a story; it makes you feel it in your bones. it explores the way we grieve, the way we heal, and the way we find love even in the most unexpected places. the ghosts in this novel are not just echoes of the past—they are reminders of the love we carry, the flavors that stay with us, and the memories that never truly fade.

this book is for anyone who has ever longed for one more moment with someone they’ve lost, for anyone who finds solace in the ritual of a shared meal, for anyone who believes that love, whether in life or beyond can be the most powerful force of all. this story is to be savored, devoured, and remembered. a masterpiece of emotion, storytelling, and sensory wonder, it is one of the most beautiful books i've read in a long time.

what an experience this was. a must-read definitely. predicting that this will be one of the best literary fiction for 2025.

thank you Simon & Schuster & the lovely Daria Lavelle for giving me this copy last year. i cannot wait for this book to come out so i can brag about it to everyone.

pub date: May 20, 2025

Run don't walk to pre-order your copy of Aftertaste, releasing May 20, 2025!

SPOILER-FREE SYNOPSIS:
Konstantin "Kostya" Duhovny has been living with a secret for most of his life. When Kostya was 10 years old, his father died suddenly. Ever since, flavors of foods he's never tasted before flood his mouth whenever a spirit is present. One evening when he gets an aftertaste of a cocktail he's never drunk before, and he makes it for a mourning stranger, he realizes that he can bring a departed loved one back for the duration of one meal (or one drink) to offer closure for those who are grieving. When he finds his calling in helping both the living and the departed, he learns everything he can in the New York culinary scene, but messing with the Afterlife has its repercussions.

Aftertaste is officially in my top 3 favorite novels of all time. 🥹

I DEVOURED this novel and I have a feeling I'll be thinking about this novel for a very long time - maybe forever. Aftertaste had me hooked from the author's note. What a unique, beautiful, and moving ode to food and the memories attached to our sense of taste. Lavelle possesses the ability to provoke strong emotions (I teared up so many times) and to draw such vivid details in the form of clever and genius culinary similes and metaphors. It was extra fun to have this book take place in the iconic culinary scene of NYC - an area I visit so frequently with my husband. Lavelle has an impeccable gift for writing, and if this debut novel is any indication, I'll be reading every single thing she writes in the future.

Thank you SO much to Net Galley and Simon & Schuster for this ARC!

Review: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Genre: literary fiction, speculative fiction, magic realism, fantasy
Trigger warnings: grief, suicide, social ideations

Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/brendiboo
Instagram: www.instagram.com/bookishbrendiboo

This was such a new interesting read for me. I really enjoyed these characters and all of the food references. Thank you to netgalley for an advanced copy. My opinions are my own.

Aftertaste is a unique blend of the paranormal, love, and grief. Kostya, our MC, finds that he can reunite people with their deceased loved ones for the length it take them to prepare a beloved dish. I feel many readers can and will relate to the fact we often have very strong and nostalgic feelings we attach to food. I wonder how many of us would be willing to try Kostya's method just to spend one more moment with a lost loved one? Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for sending me this ARC. You can check this out when it publishes May 20, 2025.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I thought the story was pretty slow for the first half but the pacing was much better the second half. I really enjoyed the who concept of tasting ghosts. I like how Kostya is an imperfect and flawed character. His success in the restaurant world is driven by grief and childhood trauma. And honestly the end was not quite how I expected it. It's refreshing to read a story every once in a while that isn't a neat perfect, fairy tale happy ending.
For the most part I enjoyed the author's writing style. The ghost interludes were confusing and hard to follow. It took me a few of them to figure out what was going on. That said, you can't help but picture the food or what to make it yourself the way the author describes it.
Thank you to the author and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle is a novel that asks: What if grief had a flavor? What if love did? What if ghosts weren’t just whispering memories but full-course meals haunting your senses? This book is rich. Not just in its writing, but in how it layers grief, love, and sensory experience. It’s lush, devastating, and deeply weird in the best way. You’ll want to savor it—preferably with a well-paired glass of wine.

a delectable book full of flavors, both bitter and sweet. the characters have just the right flavor profiles. a book I would devour again. 5 stars. tysm for the arc.

I received an ARC copy of this book from NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Where to start? This story was a huge detour from my normal genres, but as a food lover I thought I would give it a try. The story itself is very unique in that our MC can sense ghosts, but only by way of their favorite food from when they were alive which floods his mouth when they are near. That connection evolves over time and he uses it bring closure to others who have lost loved ones.

While I am a fan of food, I struggled a bit with some of the descriptions. The book is worth the read since it is such an original concept and I am grateful to have been able to obtain a ARC. My only other feedback is that while the story had lots of interesting facets, it did seem to drag a bit in places.

Thank you Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for this early review copy. I tried to enjoy this, but it just isn't for me. I think it has an audience though, and as far as I read, the writing was skillful!

DNF @ 25%

3.8/5 Rounded up
When I saw the tagline TJ Klune meets The Bear I had to read this. It had a really cool synopsis and concept and it showed. The main character Kostya has been able to sense ghost since he was young by way of their favor foods and although he's been trying to suppress that side of him he turns it into a way for people to reunite with their loved ones and get closure. It's a story with a bit of magical surrealism and some whimsy and the underlying theme of grief and how people deal with it. As someone that works in the food industry I loved everything about the food imagery and how Kostya visualized and brought every dish to life despite not having had taste some of the foods/drinks himself. The story felt a bit long and heavy at times but overall I really enjoyed it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC, all opinions are my own.